Comments for Three Letter Acronym

Comment on Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better! by James Thomson

James Thomson — Tue, 17 May 2011 08:55:41 +0000

Thanks, that’s a very kind offer – but I couldn’t accept! For a start, we’re on the other side of the planet…

Comment on Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better! by Lyle Gunderson

Lyle Gunderson — Tue, 17 May 2011 04:15:19 +0000

Moving from a house with a century-old kitchen (they just moved the woodstove out, plugged up the chimney, and moved in a gas stove back in the 40s) to one built about five years ago changed my whole attitude about cooking, food, washing dishes (think push-buttons vs. pearl diving), and life in general. I hope you get your new kitchen soon! If you would like a one-year subscription to “Cook’s Illustrated”, just email me your snail mail address.

Comment on Universal cheapness by Lyle Gunderson

Lyle Gunderson — Tue, 17 May 2011 04:06:30 +0000

Rob Lewis and I had the same idea, basically. I was going to suggest that PCalc give answers that were slightly, randomly, incorrect. Perhaps with increasing error over time. But I suspect you are not cruel enough, so maybe the increasing launch delay tactic might do it. For me, what convinced me to cough up another $9.99 (I was planning on $19.99) for the copy of PCalc I’m running on a second Mac was your assurance that doing so would really make a difference to you and Saskia. I’m a sucker for that sort of stuff.

By the way, I finally watched TRON the other day, in preparation for watching the sequel. Now the Flynn style for PCalc makes sense, and now I know that you’re a fan. Just like “6×7=?” told me something else about you!

Thanks again for creating PCalc. It doubles that value of any Mac onto which it is installed!

Comment on Universal cheapness by pjm

pjm — Sat, 14 May 2011 02:18:43 +0000

Late to the party here, and I come with a somewhat shameful story. It took me several years of occasionally using Graphic Converter to actually get me to cough up the $30 or so (at the time — maybe 2004 or so). The model of “still works, but takes an increasingly long pause before getting to a working state” worked perfectly on me: I was always able to get the job I needed done, but it became an annoyance to wait over a minute for it to launch. Then one fine day…

Cheers,
Paul

Comment on Universal cheapness by Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 05 May 2011 06:06:17 +0000

Guess I’m just a cheap user but I don’t like buying the same app multiple times especially if it’s on the same os(iOS). I would NEVER buy the same video/mp3 multiple times and break drm to play it on any device I own, and I use wine to share apps I own in windows in Linux and if I owned a Mac I would do the same.

I think more developers need to do what valve is doing with SteamPlay (buy it once and play it on Mac/PC, and more recently buy it on ps3 and play it on ps3/Mac/PC)

That said I bought pcalc for iOS and love it, good job.

Comment on Your Google AdWords Approval Status by Michael

Michael — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:33:12 +0000

This is great, but who do we need to speak to?

Comment on How To Change Your App Store Release Date by Mobile App Developers List « UK iPhone App Developers

Mobile App Developers List « UK iPhone App Developers — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 03:08:03 +0000

[...] GDC 09) http://www.mobileorchard.com/xcode-objective-c-macros-cheatsheet-for-iphone-programmers/ http://www.dragthing.com/blog/?p=37 (details app store release date “trick”) [...]

Comment on Of Redirections And Affiliations by GeoRiot

GeoRiot — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 04:50:28 +0000

In regards to your comment “The downside is also that you can only have one affiliate scheme at a time..” I wanted to give you a quick heads up on a project I’ve been working on to solve exactly this.

GeoRiot is a service that works as a proxy to geotarget, translate and encode your affiliate links so you can use multiple affiliate program simultaneously and ensure you are capitalizing on your international traffic.

While the GeoRiot links are just as ugly as the LinkShare links you can easily hide them behind redirect as well.

Comment on Universal cheapness by FlyboyArt

FlyboyArt — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 07:43:01 +0000

Hi James,

There are always going to be cheap users and overly greedy developers in this world. The wonderful thing about life is that we have the choice to serve them or not. I’ve been a developer since 1975 and released some of the first shareware/donateware/nagware/trialware software around. It’s a great way to let folks try out your software and decide whether it’s useful enough to them to pay or not. The catch (as you’ve pointed out) is that if you don’t limit the time they can use it or the functionality in some way, there’s little incentive (other than being honest OMG) to pay for it. Human nature as it is, I believe you have to push them a bit to ‘do the right thing’.

At $19 your software is not priced too high and anyone who truly appreciates a well crafted tool they use regularly should be more than willing to cough up and pay. Your IOS versions people have to buy on faith as there is no facility to try it out other than perhaps a free lite version (which I think is worse than trialware). With the upcoming Mac AppStore I think your problem may be solved (in some ways) if this new way of selling Mac software models itself after the IOS store.

If you choose not to support a product in the Mac Store then by all means time-limit and/or function-limit PCalc and let the chips fall with the honest folks of the world.

Keep doing what you are doing and don’t feel guilty about wanting to be compensated for your creativity, your hard work and your ethics.

Happy Holidays, Art

Comment on Universal cheapness by Brian Farrell

Brian Farrell — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 03:20:54 +0000

I hack a little here and there, but by no means consider myself a developer. That said, I _definitely_ think Users are particularly tight-fisted. It’s really absurd – I think developers suffer the same problem that Musicians and other artists suffer in the digital age. For some reason, people don’t place significant value on intellectual property – recognition of the talent and the hard work that goes into creating it.

While I agree with you that Developers can be pretty cheap at times as well, that doesn’t bother me as much because they are only shooting themselves in the foot – they only exacerbate the problem with the Users and make it less likely that people will buy their software.

I _really_ value a fine piece of software and so am more than willing to pay a fair price when I come across something that makes my socks roll up and down. The idea of shareware is nice in that I like being able to try before I buy, but I think that you as a developer also need to protect yourself – you should completely disable the software after the trial period is over. If they like it, then they should pay for it…